1. Field of Art
This invention relates generally to the field of computer operations and more specifically to the analysis of program faults taking place within a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprise computer systems have become increasingly complex with a large number of computer systems contributing functions, data, communications, and user interfaces. All of these systems include processes that may generate faults, such as abnormal terminations, time-outs, and other errors. Such faults lead to a variety of grave problems, such as lost sales or production, leaving internal users idle, and diversion of development resources from new development and maintenance to merely addressing the faults. These faults, regardless of size, adversely affect productivity of the organization and collectively have a large cost associated with them. However, managing such faults is difficult, and poses one of the primary challenges of administering an enterprise computer system.
Fault administration applications have been developed to gather information on faults throughout monitored systems. Existing products collect information on individual program faults, store the information to a database, and allow generation of reports. However, such reports merely describe separate, individual aspects of the fault information, such as a breakdown of faults by error code, by identity of faulting process, or by source machine. Such specialized reports are useful for specific areas, but fail to provide useful category-based summaries or to identify the specific faults that are of particular concern. Instead, users are obliged to attempt to manually identify such problem areas by examining multiple reports and correlating data, a process which is both time-consuming and error-prone.